The fog descends
A week after lockdown was enforced in Barcelona, Rachel got out of bed, opened her laptop, and prepared for a busy day ahead. After an hour, a sudden wave of fatigue hit her. She went back to bed and slept all day.
Rachel had caught covid. But there was no fever, cough, or trouble breathing—so she assumed it was the flu and took only a couple of days off work. She believed the worst was over.
Then, a week later, fatigue seized her body once more. Plus, she had a fever this time. A doctor told her she’d “probably” caught covid—tests weren’t available at the time—and not yet fully recovered. She quarantined and took a week off work.
Again, she tried to return to work but the fatigue came back—ten times worse.
“I couldn’t get out of bed. I had the worst brain fog—I literally couldn’t think about anything. An email that before would’ve taken me five minutes now took an hour to write. I struggled to follow basic recipes and remember the Spanish word for ‘please’.”
The cycle continued over several months: take time off work, ride out the symptoms, return to work, feel like shit, repeat.
Rachel tried to push her way through the fatigue. There was the time she felt optimistic after going for a short run, only to spend the next day in bed, unable to move. Or the time when restrictions were lifted, allowing for small outdoor gatherings. Rachel knew her friends were at the beach, but she could barely walk out the front door of her building.
The fog had become all-consuming. It was a burden—not just physically—but mentally, too:
“My memory got really bad. I’d leave my flat and struggle to remember if I’d locked the door. I couldn’t trust my brain.”
<quote-author>Rachel Reid<quote-author><quote-company>Partnerships Manager at Chameleon<quote-company>
This produced compulsions, like obsessively checking she'd locked the front door. She was in a state of constant anxiety—anxiety that her health was permanently damaged, that she might have given covid to her friends. And the anxiety that nobody would even believe she had covid, since her antibody test returned a false negative.
She was caught in a classic catch-22: unable to work due to illness, unable to rest due to guilt.
Something had to give.
A life check-in
Rachel told her manager that she needed a month off work, which wasn’t easy:
“I thought my job was so important. It felt like everything would fall apart if I didn’t go to work.”
In reality, the time off helped. She stripped back her schedule, removing anything that felt like too much effort:
"I’d go to the park near my house and just lie there. Or, at a stretch, do 30 minutes of light yoga.”
Over the course of that month, her health started to improve. She felt more energised, the brain fog began to lift, and she found herself cooking and speaking Spanish again.
But on the morning she was due back at work, she woke up in floods of tears—she was having an anxiety attack. She called her sister, who could always put things in perspective:
“My sister framed it as a life check-in. She made me realise I was putting my job before myself, and that— to get better—I needed to quit.”
So the next day, Rachel handed in her notice. That’s when she truly began to work on herself.
She first tried to get rid of any internal pressure to do stuff. Which—for someone as self-demanding as Rachel—was really hard. Up to that point, she thought that being a good human meant always needing to achieve.
Now, she had to learn to drop everything. She minimised her use of WhatsApp to remove any obligation to respond to messages. Inevitably, this meant that she lost some relationships. But the people that mattered most to Rachel understood why she had stepped back. She also started writing a journal. Not because she had to, but because it was therapeutic.
Rachel says that on reflection, there’s more—or less, even—she could’ve done during this time. She was still drinking alcohol, even though she knew it didn’t help her anxiety. She was yet to start therapy. But the weight of obligation she’d been carrying for years began to lift.
Gaining new clarity
Rachel believes she’s had anxiety her whole life. When she was 28, she went on holiday with her family. That’s when the panic attacks began:
“I had the worst anxiety of my life. I was crying the whole time, I couldn't sleep, I couldn’t stop thinking about work and my health.”
At the time, she couldn’t articulate it—she just knew she “had this thing”. Nor did she know how bad it was. So she left it alone.
It wasn’t until her experience with long covid that Rachel became really aware of her anxiety:
